For 10 months, from 2004 to 2005, a mentally ill Australian citizen named Cornelia Rau was wrongfully incarcerated in her own nation’s immigration detention. Rau was attempting to flee to Germany when she was picked up by Queensland police. She told the authorities she was a German tourist who had illegally traveled to Australia. Despite inconsistencies in her story, she was labeled an unlawful non-citizen and transferred, eventually, to the Baxter Detention Centre, in the middle of South Australian desert.
Rau was not mentally fit enough to realize it, but when she forfeited her Australian identity, she forfeited all her rights. Australia has some of the most draconian policies in the world for dealing with refugees and migrants; all asylum seekers face mandatory, indefinite detention, and there is no independent review. When her story finally emerged, thanks to the reporting of journalist Andra Jackson, it led to a independent inquiry of Rau’s case as it was handled by DIMIA, Australia’s Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs.
The case became a public relations nightmare for DIMIA, leading to scrutiny that it had previously repelled with ease—due in no small part to the fact that Rau was a white Australian woman. As politics professor and author Robert Manne wrote in Australia’s The Monthly, “The case of Cornelia Rau shaped public opinion about the treatment of asylum seekers in a way no previous episode had. […] It was able to do this, as almost everyone immediately understood, because the person who had suffered false imprisonment and neglect was not a swarthy, dark-skinned, Islamic outsider. She was ‘one of us’.”
Stateless, debuting July 8 on Netflix, uses Rau’s story as an entry point for exploring the Australian detention system. Yvonne Strahovski plays the Rau-inspired Sofie Werner, who in fragments and flashbacks hits the major points of Rau’s sad tale—alleged sexual assault at the hand of a charismatic cult leader, a mental breakdown following expulsion from that organization, and imprisonment at a facility called Barton, run by a private firm called Corvo. A new corrections officer named Cam Sanford (Jai Courtney) starts working there around the same time she’s incarcerated, lured to Corvo by a salary that will allow him to support his wife and three kids. Another detainee, Ahmed Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), who fled Afghanistan with his family, arrives alone at Barton, hoping to be reunited with his wife and two daughters. Meanwhile, aggressively ponytailed Clare Kowitz (Asher Keddie) starts a new post as the politically appointed warden of Barton.
The proceedings play out a little like prestige TV mad libs: four main characters, from very different life circumstances, who will be horribly altered and deeply affected by the punishing grind of an inhumane system. The series recalls Netflix's landmark show Orange Is the New Black, but without that show's dark, biting humor. Stateless is revealing, especially in Ameer’s heartbreaking segments, but it plays out in ways that are almost entirely predictable. Would it surprise you to learn that Sanford, the new hire played by Courtney, becomes a violent, abusive version of himself when he’s on the job? Or that idealistic Clare becomes a ruthless, oppressive leader at Barton, as the power she’s been given goes to her head? Conditions deteriorate at Barton in a way that is kind of grimly watchable, but sort of punishing, too: Can we expect a happy ending for poor, hapless Ameer, played with heartbreaking gravity by Bazzi? Not really. All we can do is bear witness to his suffering—and wait for the series to end.
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Review: Stateless on Netflix Tries to Illuminate the Australian Refugee Crisis - Vanity Fair
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